TH&CONVERSATION Dalstar-Jiri Dokoupil cover: Femke Gerestein - illustratie uit (nog) ongepubliceerd prentenboek (www.femkegerestein.nl) By: Dalstar Art has no end, but the life of the artist is finite. This is why priests started to scribble their drawings on smooth rock surface of the neolythic world at the end of the last ice age and their contemporary followers of fashion, in their craving for immortality, do the same on paper, canvas, video or the movie screen during the current episode of global warming. There is nothing new under the sun, except of course the word: "new" for those who believe that the development of language changed the course of human history through increasing complexity of technological innovation. Stone became copper, copper became bronze, bronze became iron, iron became steel and steel became the melting pot in which all other chemicals could be processed by scientists, with a little help from their friends, to make atomic bombs, video cameras, computers and the internet. So far, so good. Nothing wrong. But how about sex? During the reign of roman emperor August, say in the year zero-zero at the moment of birth of Jesus Christ Superstar, there were approximately 250 million humans roaming around the face of the earth. Anno Domini 2010 this number somehow multiplied up to 9 milliard humanoids, not only walking or riding on horseback, but driving hundreds of millions of cars, riding hundreds of thousands of trains, giga airplanes and sailing on enormous cruise ships in order to get away from their fellow men and women in an overcrowded neighborhood. Why? Because people keep fucking like they did 2000 years ago to inscribe their genetic baby codes into future generations of temporary immortality of family names, tribal reputations, national cultures and global power systems. In this respect Joseph Beuys was right: everybody is an artist! Disregarding the quality of the artwork, Beuys, a former German war pilot crashing over the Ukraine plains somewhere during the nineteen forties was a notorious democratic artist, as the word: "everybody" clearly suggests. Following his populist rhetoric, issued from the Düsseldorf art academy up till the end of the nine eighties, art was to be seen as a "social work"and surely not as a personal expression of an individual emotion. Beuys, for that matter, was talking numbers instead of beauty. With a keen eye on the history of human slaughter, in which he himself had been an offender as well as a victim, he proclaimed a small cultural revolution, in which the survival of the individual artist depended on his ability to communicate a popular message to the modern masses. "Modern" because the battle about the quality of art belonged to the core of modern popular art and competition between generations of artists included not only peaceful protest but also armed struggle for unknown ideals as well as militant annihilation of common but perverse material circumstances. decreet 031 juni 2010 103

Tijdschriftenbank Zeeland

Decreet | 2010 | | pagina 26